Method Content Categories

Standard Categories

Standard categories provide a means to categorize core method content in line with the best practices for creating structured methods. Standard categories are linked with a specific method content type. For example, disciplines may contain only tasks.

Standard category types are:

• Disciplines - A discipline is a collection of tasks that are related to a major area of concern within the overall IT environment. For example, on a software development project, it is common to perform certain requirements tasks in close coordination with analysis and design tasks. Separating these tasks into separate disciplines makes the tasks easier to comprehend. Disciplines can be organized using discipline groupings.
• Domains - A domain is a logical hierarchy of related work products grouped together based on timing, resources, or relationship. While a domain categorizes many work products, a work product belongs to only one domain. Domains can be further divided into sub-domains.
• Work Product Kinds - Work product kind is another category for grouping work products. A work product can have many work product kinds. As an example, you might want to have a series of work product kinds that correspond to the overall intent of work products, such as specification, plan, or model.
• Role Sets - A role set is used to group roles with certain commonalities together. For example, in a software development environment, an Analyst role set could be used to group together roles such as Business Process Analyst, System Analyst and Requirements Specifier. Each of these roles work with similar techniques and have overlapping skills, but may be responsible for performing certain tasks and creating certain work products. Role sets can be organized using role set groupings.
• Tools - Tools is a container for tool mentors. Tools can also provide general descriptions of a tool and it's general capabilities.

Custom Categories

Custom Categories are highly customizable and can contain any type of element. Custom Categories allow you to categorize content according to any scheme you want and can then be used to compose publishable Views, providing a means to organize the method content prior to publishing. For example, you could create a custom category that logically organizes content relevant to your development organization department, such as a Testing category that groups together all roles, work products, tasks, and guidance elements relevant to testing.